The proposed project is a research program on organizational processes in visual perception and information processing. Despite the failure of Gestalt psychology as a systematic theory, it is felt that the recognition of perceptual organization represents a fundamental insight into the characteristics of perception. This research will attempt to determine whether the organizational properties of perception reflect functional properties of information intake rather than simply arbitrary and accidental characteristics of the perceptual system. The research has three broad aims: (1) To determine whether and in what ways Gestalt-like organization affects perceptual processing; (2) To develop measures of Gestalt-like organizational properties from which to predict the processing effects; and (3) To develop a theoretical account of the relation between organization and processing. The project has already established information processing effects of two Gestalt principles, and work is progressing on several others. Among these are effects of grouping by target-noise similarity and by homogeneity of noise items on a visual detection of a target item in a field containing none-target (noise) items. The research also investigates configurational effects in iconic memory and in lateral masking. One overall generalization about the effect of configurational variables is that performance in detecting a target is degraded to the extent that perceptual organization causes it to be clustered in the same group with noise elements. Several lines of research proposed here test the validity of this generalization.